Clayton Christensen
Clayton Christensen
Clayton M. Christensenis an American scholar, educator, author, business consultant, and religious leader who currently serves as the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, having a joint appointment in the Technology & Operations Management and General Management faculty groups. He is best known for his study of innovation in commercial enterprises. His first book, The Innovator's Dilemma, articulated his theory of disruptive innovation. Christensen is also a co-founder of Rose Park Advisors, a venture...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth6 April 1952
CountryUnited States of America
discovered figure life promise rough rudder sail seas students time
I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they'll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered while at school. If they don't figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life.
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If we are to develop profound theory to solve the intractable problems in our societally-critical domains... we must learn to crawl into the life of what makes people tick.
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I love my life as a missionary, keeping myself on the front lines. The image in my mind is that God, my general, stands at the door when I go out every morning; and, knowing what the war is like, day after day he gives me his most powerful weapon: his Spirit. For this I am grateful.
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The way I ought to measure my life is in terms of the others I helped to become better and happier people. That's the biggest thing to think about if you're not happy.
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Most marketers think there's a concept called a product life cycle. Once you realize that the world is organized by jobs that need to be done, you understand that product life cycles don't exist.
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In the scriptures, we are told you can't really understand happiness unless you understand sadness. You don't know pleasure if you don't know pain. It's part of life. So can you learn something from somebody who has gone from success to success to success? I don't think so.
dimensions stops successful
If you're successful and growing, you can manage any way you want to. Growth makes so many dimensions of management easier. It's when growth stops that things get tough.
available economic natural number reduce
Efficiency innovations are a natural part of the economic cycle, but these are the innovations that streamline process and actually reduce the number of available jobs.
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The marginal cost of doing something 'just this once' always seems to be negligible, but the full cost will typically be much higher. Yet unconsciously, we will naturally employ the marginal-cost doctrine in our personal lives.
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I don't feel that this concept of disruptive technology is the solution for everybody. But I think it's very important for innovators to understand what we've learned about established companies' motivation to target obvious profitable markets - and about their inability to find emerging ones. The evidence is just overwhelming.
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If you understand cause and effect, it brings about a set of insights that leads you to a very different place. The knowledge will persuade you that the market isn't organized by customer category or by product category. If you understand the job that consumers need to complete, you can articulate all of the experiences in that job.
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In organizations, once you articulate how success will be measured, everybody tries to game the system so that they are measured in the best possible way.
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Efficiency innovations arise in industries that already exist. They provide existing goods and services at much lower costs. They are not empowering. Efficiency innovators become the low cost providers within an existing framework.
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Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.